Singer Latha Mangeshkar Declined her First Film Fare Award

The Filmfare Awards are presented annually by The Times Group to honour both artistic and technical excellence of professionals in the Hindi language film industry of India. The Filmfare ceremony is one of the oldest film events in India. The awards were first introduced in 1954, the same year as the National Film Awards. They were initially referred to as the Clare Awards or The Clares after Clare Mendonca, the editor of The Times of India. A dual voting system was developed in 1956. Under this system, in contrast to the National Film Awards, which are decided by a panel appointed by Indian Government, the Filmfare Awards are voted on by both the public and a committee of experts.

The ceremony had been sponsored by various private organisations in the past as well as in present provisions. During several years in 1990s, a live ceremony was broadcast to television audiences but was later discontinued due to unknown reasons. Since 2000, a recorded and an edited version of the awards ceremony was televised on SET a week or two after the ceremony has been held already. The 63rd Filmfare Awards were televised on Colors.

Until the mid-1990s, Filmfare Awards were not only preeminent but were also well-recognized popular awards ceremony in India film industry until several clone awards with similar model of awarding and stage performance pattern started sprouting up in Mumbai. There is no data statistics recorded in reference to television viewership for the ceremony, but several press reports have pointed out that along with various other Indian film awards having similar type of technique and too much of cloning by each other, the ceremony has resulted with less curiosity among audiences and poor viewership since 2000s. The Filmfare Awards have been often referred to as the Hindi film industry’s equivalent to the Academy Awards in the United States.

It also has other branches of Awards like Filmfare Awards South for Cinema of South India, Filmfare Marathi Awards for Marathi cinema, Filmfare Awards East for eastern Indian cinema which started few years back